“But the Orlando massacre was certainly a hate crime, a bias-motivated attack aimed directly at the LGBTQ community for whom Pulse was a safe home and place of celebration,” said MSNBC after the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in an article titled “Why calling the Orlando shooting a hate crime matters: analysis”.

A narrative was being spread throughout mainstream media like wildfire.

“ISIL or not, Orlando shooting was hate crime against LGBT people,” chirped another by USA Today.

“Orlando nightclub gunman remembered as abusive, homophobic and racist,” added another header from the LA Times.

The Daily Beastpublished a story with the header and sub-header, “Omar Mateen Committed LGBT Mass Murder. We Must Confront That. — The media and politicians are in retreat from calling Omar Mateen’s massacre an act of anti-LGBT hate. Especially in Pride month, this erasure must not happen.”

“ORLANDO SHOOTING: HATE CRIME BY A LONE WOLF RATHER THAN ISIS-LED ATTACK,” blaredNewsweek.

“Thank you to the LGBT community!” Trump tweeted shortly after the shooting. “I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.”

“Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist,” Trump said during the Republican National Convention. “This time, the terrorist targeted our LGBT community. As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”

This hand-gifted counter-narrative against accusations of homophobia culminated in a widely-circulated photo op a week before the election featuring Trump posing with an upside-down rainbow flag handed to him by a conveniently placed audience member with “LGBTs for TRUMP” written on it in sharpie.

The far left jumped in to counter these Islamophobic takes with its own arguments imploring everyone to focus on homophobia and not Muslim violence in the wake of the attack, with everywhere from SocialistWorker.org to Green Left Weekly getting in on the action with headlines like “Letter from the US: Homophobia behind Orlando killings, not ‘Islamic terrorism’” and “Don’t turn homophobia into Islamophobia”.

So who was right?

None of them were. It was all pure bullshit.

A recent Intercept report by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain documents how there was never any real evidence that Omar Mateen was motivated by homophobia to kill 50 people at a gay nightclub on June 12, 2016, and how new evidence in the trial of Mateen’s wife has emerged which almost certainly disproves that narrative. Though to this day that remains a widespread belief about his motives, Mateen had no idea Pulse was a gay nightclub, did not select it as a target for that reason, and had never expressed homophobic sentiments to people who knew him.

What actually motivated Mateen? Same thing that motivates most Muslim terrorists: western warmongering. Which he himself said at the time.

“Because you have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. They are killing a lot of innocent people,” Mateen said during a call to 911. “What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. … You need to stop the U.S. airstrikes. They need to stop the U.S. airstrikes, OK? . … This went down, a lot of innocent women and children are getting killed in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan, OK?”

But US media didn’t want anyone to focus on that as Mateen’s motive for the attack. They wanted everyone to focus on homophobia instead.

Demonstrations against hate crimes targeting the LGBT community took place around the world, and gay pride colors lit landmarks everywhere from the Eiffel Tower to the One World Trade Center spire to the Tel Aviv City Hall to the Gateshead Millennium Bridge as public attention was conveniently paced away from yet another reminder that the “war on terror” creates more terrorists than it kills as people in Muslim majority countries watch their mothers, fathers, sons and daughters ripped to pieces by explosives dropped from the sky. Obama condemned the attack as “an act of hate” while continuing the unprecedented drone warfare campaign which actually caused it.

This is everything that is sick about western culture in general and the US in particular. It doesn’t matter that my government is filling the skies of sovereign nations on the other side of the planet with flying death machines, because I have a rainbow flag bumper sticker on my car. I don’t care that Trump is continuing and expanding on all of Bush and Obama’s most bloodthirsty agendas, I care that he said “shit hole countries”. Cluster bomb whomever you please, western war machine, just as long as you are careful to call them all by their preferred gender pronouns.

Of course it was reasonable for there to be an outpouring of support for the LGBT community following an attack on a gay nightclub, just as it would be for any tragedy that impacted members of any other disadvantaged group. But to deliberately paint the attack as a hate crime committed by a homophobic Muslim who wanted to kill gay people despite there being no solid evidence for that narrative from day one was wrong, and to do it to distract from his obvious actual motives was downright evil.

The so-called “war on terror” goes completely unquestioned by the establishment propaganda machine because it is a foundational element of the empire it serves. By securing the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists after September 11, the empire has been able to legally expand the presence of the US war machine into any region it wants by simply flooding the area with terrorists. All it took was the destabilization caused by Bush’s wars to create a chaotic environment ripe for exploitation and manipulation by operations from the CIA, Mossad, and other allied intelligence agencies, and now any disobedient leader in the region like Gaddafi or Assad can be attacked by western-backed terrorist forces with the assistance of NATO troops.

The empire’s most revolutionary military innovation in recent years hasn’t come in the form of a new kind of bomb or helicopter, but in the vastly increased ability to use extremist factions in conjunction with psyops and propaganda to destroy and destabilize entire regions in a very targeted way. That combined with America’s AUMF and drone program has served as the perfect workaround for the increasing discomfort the US public has been having with flag-draped coffins being carted out of airplanes in the name of spreading freedom and democracy. Replace the US troops with terrorists and flying death robots, and the only people getting killed are poor brown-skinned strangers you never have to think about in countries you’ll never visit.

The “war on terror” has never been about fighting terrorism, it has been about creating and inflicting terrorism.

Remember, the most powerful among us will have the most advanced and well-funded manipulations, and the best manipulators will dress savagery and psychopathy up as high-minded social justice issues and enlightened progressive values. It will never come out and say “Evil is great! Let’s go kill people,” it will make a great big show of defending oppressed minorities and opposing bigotry while slyly having you sign off on acts of murder and mayhem hidden in the small print. The smiling face of establishment politics would distract you with a feel-good self-righteous rainbow flag-waving orgy to keep you from thinking about how your government is creating and inflicting terrorism upon the world in order to advance geopolitical agendas in strategic regions. But feeling good is a very different thing from being good.

May the world focus less on feeling good and more on being good, less on fake virtue signaling demonstrations and more on actually fighting the powerful for the benefit of the defenseless, less on appearing politically correct and more on ripping apart the oppression machine itself.May we act less in a way which does not even inconvenience the elites who rule over us, and more in a way that worries them. Please and thank you.

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Marko/March 11, 2018

OCT 20 Women’s March on the Pentagon (Give a Sh!t) Public · Hosted by Cindy Sheehan and Bonnie J. Caracciolo To Confront the Bi-Partisan War Machine

In response to the continuing march of military aggression by the USA and to put an antiwar agenda back on the table of activists, we are calling for a Women’s (and allies) March on the Pentagon tentatively set for the 51st anniversary of the 1967 big antiwar event in DC and subsequent march on the Pentagon that had 50,000 people! However, this is NOT, nor will it turn into a Get Out the Vote Rally for the Democrat 1/2 of the War Party. This is a principled call to action against the entire rotten Empire. ( i.e. , leave the Pussy Hats at home )

We are peaceful and we just wanna be free, everyone I know is crying, crying everyday

All we are saying is, what we are saying is, all that we’re saying is: Stop killing our friends

Stop killing our friends in Baghdad, Beirut and Gaza We want to hear the sound of children’s laughter ringing through the plaza Your mean bombs and your cheap shots Your demonic media and your rotten thoughts Could never stop us from being alive and in love!

elkojohn/March 10, 2018

It has been completely amazing to me how the anti-war people I know used to be intelligent, critical thinkers when Bush-2 was president, but now they swallow the prevailing ”Russiagate” narrative – hook, line and sinker. All those anti-war demonstrators at Camp Casey, outside the Bush ranch in Crawford TX, have scattered to the wind. Now, the arch-conservative, Tucker Carlson on Fox, is the one who pushes back against Russiagate and the war against Syria. Now, the likes of Rachael Maddow, who used to be a flaming lefty, adore the FBI, the CIA, the military espionage agencies, and our foreign ”humanitarian” wars. The ministers of propaganda have done an absolutely brilliant job of conducting the U.S. political dog and pony show, flipping everything on its head.

How do they do it?

‘ ‘ The Century of The Self ‘ ‘http://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/ The US government, big business, and the CIA use psychological techniques to manage and control the minds of the masses. They manipulate people’s innermost, unconscious desires and feelings, to persuade us that we are unique, exceptional individuals. Once our self-esteem depends on the constant stroking of our egos by consumerism, celebrities, movies, commercials, identity politics, political candidates, false patriotism, flag worship, etc. AND our fear of not being safe from immigrants, terrorists, Trump, Russia, Syria, Iran, etc., we, the consumers, are being consumed by the Orwellian, Brave New World system that we live under.

It’s terribly tempting to want to feed the hungry proletariat the meal they desire. But each of those comics you mention have all made me laugh hard. Much of late night comedy now sadly is remarkably interchangeable. Don’t despair https://t.co/MePoHPzcJq

@RobSchneider This is exactly why I reserve a special hatred for comedians like Bill Maher, Steve Colbert, Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah who sell their talent to the churning out of propaganda for establishment power structures. https://t.co/vTVPNe3kU8

Excerpt from "Mainstream 'Centrists' Pose The Greatest Ideological Threat To Us All":

People like Ashton Kutcher imagine that the so-called “center” is called that because it sits smack dab in the middle of the ideological spectrum between communism and fascism, right in that moderate sweet spot that respects capitalism and private ownership without flying off the deep end into Nazi-like tyranny. In reality, the status quo exists entirely outside any left-right paradigm. It’s neither “left” nor “right” to give total control of the western world to an alliance of plutocrats and opaque government agencies who seek to expand their power and wealth by destroying our ecosystem, waging endless wars, and gradually shoring up more and more control of their citizenry via internet censorship, surveillance and police militarization. It’s just crazy.

I’m picking on Ashton not because he occupies some special place in all this, but because he doesn’t. He’s just an illustration of how blind people have become to the real threat that’s right in front of them, and how normalized insanity has become.

People who identify as “left” see the ruling power establishment as right-wing, people who identify as “right” see the ruling power establishment as left-wing, and people who identify as “center” see themselves as moderates whose normal, healthy way of life is under threat by the “far right” and “far left”. But really all that’s happening is a few assholes fucking over everyone else, which is no more “left” or “right” than a terrorist attack. The left versus right argument doesn’t even make sense until this far more pressing issue has been resolved. A Bernie supporter and a Trump supporter are arguing about left versus right while trapped in a room with a tiger who’s eating them both alive.